Advent 1: Anticipation

SERMON: 2010-11-28--ad0110--advent-1-anticipation SOURCE DURATION: 00:39:32.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 0.95 APPROVED: false REASON: The recording begins with the editor's exposition on anticipation and concludes with a lengthy prayer/benediction, both of which are integral parts of the sermon material. Acoustic segmentation found sustained music at the end edge and moved the boundary to the adjacent transcript segment. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: 00:27:53.200-00:28:01.660, 00:28:28.280-00:28:35.480, 00:28:48.680-00:29:01.720, 00:29:15.940-00:29:18.980, 00:29:33.080-00:29:36.120, 00:30:03.740-00:30:08.520, 00:30:14.800-00:30:19.380, 00:30:58.300-00:31:05.360, 00:31:09.020-00:31:18.700, 00:31:32.100-00:31:35.580, 00:32:05.660-00:32:13.160, 00:32:43.780-00:32:48.220, 00:32:56.860-00:33:07.940, 00:35:14.180-00:39:30.600 ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: yes ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: end Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- I want to talk with you a bit in the time that remains this morning about anticipation. Because the word anticipation in its root meaning, and this was a surprise to me actually, means to literally be aware of and deal with beforehand. That's the technical definition as in I anticipate it is going to freeze and so I better cover my vegetable gardens or I anticipate that it's going to rain and so I'm going to bring my umbrella. But we use it in a less formal setting typically. Usually I think when we talk about anticipation we talk about it in the context of looking forward to something often with eager anticipation. And I believe one of the reasons the Christmas season continues to be the most popular holiday season even in a western world filled with secularization is because there is something about the Christmas season that brings out an unabashed freedom to anticipate. And so you have our children looking forward with eager anticipation to the presents perhaps they're going to receive on Christmas Day or Christmas Eve. You have families looking forward with eager anticipation perhaps to seeing loved ones that they haven't seen in a long time. Churches look forward to special music and special programs and special atmospheres and of course merchants look forward to the clinging of cash in the cash registers. I understand for some merchants 40% of their sales take place in terms of their annual sales in the weeks leading up to Christmas. Anticipation it's rooted at the very heart of the Christmas story and it gives voice to the longing that God's people have had for many years and the promises that God has made through many years that one day the frozeness of sin will give way to the dawning of a new day. And listen again to these words from Jeremiah, "In those days and at that time I will make a righteous branch sprout from David's line. He will do what is just and right in the land. In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. This is the name by which it will be called the Lord our righteousness." And you find in the words of Gabriel to the Virgin Mary in Luke's Gospel a familiar resonance of those words when he says to her, "You will be with child and give birth to a son and you are to give him the name Jesus. He will be great and he will be called the son of the most high. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever and ever." And as on this first Sunday in Advent we talk about anticipation. There are three things I want to try to share with you in the time that remains. First of all anticipation is rooted in human desire or human longing. Jesus put it so well in the Sermon on the Mount when he says, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they shall be satisfied, they shall be filled." Now I often think in Christian circles we're not always terribly comfortable with desire or with longing. And the reason for that I think is that we often associate it with sinful cravings, inappropriate sexual desire, lusting for money or power, inappropriate need for attention, and a striving for illicit success and so on. And because we know from Scripture and by the witness of the Holy Spirit that those things are wrong, we very often certainly at certain phases of our Christian life set ourselves to struggle against those longings and against those desires. And we learn to cope by killing them off and putting them away as Scripture indeed admonishes us to do. And sometimes in that process we not only kill what is bad, we also kill what is good. Because you see it is not desire. It's not hunger. That's necessarily wrong. It's what we do with it. And as John Eldridge points out I think very capably in his book, The Journey of Desire, desires are desires that need to be redeemed by Jesus. And the capacity to long and the capacity to hunger is something that God has placed within us as a gift of God that makes us seek after him, that makes us long for him, and that makes us long for his redemption. The psalmist in Psalm 42 puts it this way. He says, "As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, oh my God, my soul thirsts for God, for the living God." See, hunger is meant to drive us towards God in whom alone we will ultimately find the total fulfillment for everything that ails us. It's very helpful to remember that we were created for paradise. And if you look at the creation story of Adam and Eve in their relationship with God and in their relationship with each other and in their relationship with all of creation, it was all perfection. They truly were in paradise. But then came sin and they lost it. And from that day to this, there is in each of our hearts a hunger. There is written, I believe, in the DNA of your existence and my existence, a longing for paradise regained, a realization that we were made for more than what sometimes we experience in the course of life. It surfaces in strange ways and at strange times, it surfaces in the realization that I have just attained my dream and now I have the question, is this all there is? It surfaces in there must be more to life than what I'm presently experiencing. It surfaces in the question, do I matter to anybody? If I died tomorrow, would anybody care? It surfaces in the grieving that we do sometimes when we see injustice and brokenness of life and we cry out, why is the world the way that it is? Blessed are those that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. And there are two factors, I believe, that determine the degree to which each of us experiences that hunger for paradise regained, for the creation to be renewed. It begins, I think, and this is just my conviction, but I believe it's biblical, I believe hunger or desire is a function of my awareness of my need. I'm often reminded of this verse in the book of Revelation, Jesus speaking to the church of Laodicea. The church that he says is lukewarm, the church that he wants to spit out of his mouth. He says, "You say, 'I am rich, I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.' But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire so that you may become rich and white clothes to wear, so that you can cover your shameful nakedness and solve to put on your eyes so that you may see." See, they don't typically advertise food on television just after you have eaten, because that would be a waste. And as long as you think you've got everything that you need, there is no hunger in your life. And so sometimes God in his love will allow us to be put into situations where our life is not adding up. And instead of being angry about that and saying, "Well, what's the matter? I'm not able to pursue my dream." We ought to recognize that part of God's love in your life is to create in us a hunger that says there's got to be more than this, because only when we're hungry are we going to come to him. Mary put it this way in the song of Mary when Gabriel had come to her. And she says, "He has filled the hungry with good things, but has sent the rich away empty." And in the book of Exodus, in terms of the nation of Israel, it wasn't until they groaned in their slavery and cried out in their cry for help went up to God that scripture goes on to say, "God heard their groaning, and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. And so God looked on the Israelites, and he was concerned about them." The psalmist said, "This poor man cried to the Lord, and the Lord heard his cry." Desire, hunger is a function of awareness of our need, but it's more than that. It's also, secondly, a function, and this is counterintuitive, believe you me, it is also a function of how alive I am in the Lord. In the early years of my Christian life, I had a lot of trouble with this verse. John 4, 13 and 14, "Everyone who drinks this water says Jesus will be thirsty again. Whoever drinks the water that I will give him will never thirst." And I had come, as some of you know, through a very dark night of the soul. I had been seeking God after having earlier given my life to him and experiencing an infilling of the Holy Spirit unlike anything that I had ever experienced before, and then all of a sudden it just all went black. And I didn't even know if God still existed or what would become of me. And I remember reading that verse. And I remember saying to the Lord in my tone of complaint, "What about it? You said if I drink of the water that you give me, I will never thirst again. I've given up all this other water. I came to you because I thought you were going to fill me up, and I've come to you and now I feel like I'm more hungry, I'm more thirsty than I've ever been before." Anybody ever been there? Anybody ever discovered that your Christian life didn't quite turn out the way that you anticipated when you first started on it? And it took me a long time to figure out that what was happening was not the Lord turning against me, and it wasn't that I had just wandered away in some sin and therefore I was alienated from him, and that's always a good thing to check for, obviously. No, I discovered it was a function of coming alive in Christ. Because you see, the more alive you become in Christ, the greater becomes your appetite. Have you ever noticed? I used to wonder how do non-Christians face the kind of chaos that many people go through in the world, and it dawned upon me somewhere along the line that what people do is they just numb out and they stop feeling. One of the characteristics of children in famine is that when the hunger becomes extreme enough, their body begins to shut down and they no longer feel hungry. And you can't even begin to feed them because there is no appetite left. And so similarly, when sin captures your heart and my heart, we lose our hunger, we lose our passion for God, and we begin to settle for the frozen conditions of the world because this is all we know. But then when you come to Jesus, and Jesus gives us the light of life and He breeds faith into our hearts, and we begin to dare to hope again, we begin to dare to believe again, then all of a sudden what happens? We become hungry. And then we come to Him and He satisfies us, just like we do after dinner. But you know, as well as I do, that one meal doesn't do it for you because now you're growing stronger and pretty soon you're hungry again. Do you understand what I'm saying? And the hungrier we become, the more we are driven to find God and the fullness of His life. And so the Christian life is this odd paradox. In the one hand, we're filled with all that God has for us and with His joy. And on the other hand, the more we taste of that joy, the more we want of it. And there's something about that hunger we need to understand is not going to be fully satisfied until the wedding feast of the Lamb when Jesus comes again. And why do I make a point of that? Because sometimes I think we beat ourselves up too much. We think we ought to be more spiritual, we ought to be more content, we ought to be more satisfied. No, blessed are those who what? Hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they will be satisfied. We are looking to the city that has foundations, whose builder and maker is God. Anticipation is a function of human desire. And not all desire is bad. God plants it within our hearts. That's the first observation I want to make. The second observation that I want to make is that anticipation must be rooted in the promises of God. Listen again to verse 14 of Jeremiah 33, "The days are coming," declares the Lord, "when I will fulfill the gracious promise I made to the house of Israel and to the house of Judah." God is a covenant-making and a covenant-keeping God, all through Scripture. He comes into the human experience and He makes promises of redemption. But it's very important to understand what is the nature of the promised redemption, lest we have our wrong understanding and we end up being disappointed because our anticipation is not being fulfilled. Let me put it this way. It's a generally known fact that typically adults have lost the brilliant, enthusiastic anticipation that is so much the part of most childhoods. Would you not agree? I mean, it's children who live with unabashed anticipation. Most of us have learned to temper our anticipation just a little bit, haven't we? Why? Because we live long enough to know that hope deferred makes the heart sick. Here's the young bride. She's married the man of her choice and finds that all her hopes and her longings are going to be met in this dude whom she now has just married, only to discover that he is mortal flesh and that his flaws are going to become increasingly obvious in their married life together and there will be many a time when her heart breaks. And apart from God's grace, she will start closing down her heart and she will start settling for what is, when she lays aside her girlish dreams. Here is a new employee working for a new company, figuring that the boss will reward diligent labor and good performance, only to discover the real office politics take priority. And he comes to a point where he says, "Well, what's the use anyway? Because nobody sees me." Here is the person who joins Christian community, finds friendship and relationships like never before, thinking, "I finally come home, I belong." Only to discover that people are miserably sinful, even in the church, I know that's hard to believe. And pretty soon they say, "I'm not stepping into those relationships again because it's too costly and too painful." And here's the new believer, read all the great promises of God in scripture and has finally opened up his heart and bent his knee before God and is looking for God to be the answer to his every issue, only to discover, as we said a few moments ago, that some of his prayers continue to go unanswered. Some of his problems don't diminish, in fact, some of his problems might well increase. And slowly but surely, their heart begins to close off. He may continue to go through the motions of the Christian faith, but inside he's brought into the lie that says, "This is too risky, God, where are you? I better drink from my own fountains." Anybody ever been there? I think if we're honest, we've all been there. And then you ask yourself the question, "Why is that?" Certainly not because God is not true to his promises. Certainly not because God doesn't want to meet the deepest needs of your heart. But maybe just one reason is that we don't always, in our immaturity, have a clear understanding of what it is that God promises, and so we miss the point of what he is saying and we're expecting him to do something or to give something that would not be good for us and that would not be good for his glory or in keeping with his will. Give you a very quick example from this passage before us, verse 17 of Jeremiah 33. This is what the Lord says, "David will never fail to have a man sit on the throne of the house of Israel." And it goes on to say, of course, in verse 18, "Nor will the priests or Levites ever fail to have a man stand before me continually to offer burnt offerings and to burn grain offerings and to present sacrifices." Now if you read that apart from the context of the New Testament, what would you think God is saying to his people? I mean, we often criticize the New Testament believers in the ministry of Jesus because they have these human expectations of who the Messiah is and what the Messiah is going to do. He's going to deliver Israel, he's going to sit on David's throne, Israel is going to regain the glory they had under the Davidic and the Salmonic kingdoms and it blew their minds when that was not what Jesus came to do. And you and I look at them and we say, "Well, really they should have known better." Come on, think again. What would you and I do with the promises of God that are so clearly in the context of the historical situation of Israel? In those days, Judah will be saved, Jerusalem will live in safety. This is the name by which it will be called the Lord our righteousness. Isn't it true that very often we're disappointed in God because we expect God's blessings to be primarily given to us to make life easier in the here and now? So the question is, can we reasonably expect that just because we're Christians, God is going to give us health, wealth, success and power? There are those who teach that unabashedly. And I would be the first to say that God promises a lot of blessings to his people. But we make a serious mistake if we think that the primary application of the purposes of God is just to make your life better and my life better in the here and now. Because that's not what it is. God is building a kingdom and God is looking forward to the day when the holy city, the New Jerusalem, descends from heaven and descends upon the earth and all the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of God even as water covers the sea. And when you and I are joined by faith to Jesus, the promises that God makes to us is that he will give us every spiritual blessing in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. I believe that everything you and I need, to walk faithfully before God, to obey him, to do his will, to obey his purposes, all of that by faith we can claim through the Holy Spirit, recognizing that it's all going to be a foreshadowing of the glory that is to come. Do you understand what I'm saying? We can expect unabashedly to have a relationship with God, to be delivered from Satan's power, to have the grace of God so that we can have all things, as Peter says, that pertains to life and godliness. And if my body is ill, I can expect healing if that is going to help me do the work of God, and if my illness gets in the way of doing the work of God and God chooses not to heal me, then he will give me the grace to overcome so that I can nevertheless accomplish his purposes. Nothing but nothing can separate me from the love of God in Christ Jesus my Lord. All the promises of God are yes and amen, and if I had more time I'd elaborate on that more fully, but I'm trying to get us to see the balance. The balance between the already and the not yet through the Holy Spirit. We don't have the full inheritance yet, but we have the first fruits, we have the foretaste of what is to come. And the hungrier God makes us, the greater our desire to meet up with him, the more prepared he is to pour out his life and his grace and his mercy so that we can do the will of our Father who is in heaven. So anticipation is a function of human desire. That anticipation to be realized must be squarely based on a proper understanding of what it is that God promises his children in the here and now. And if it is, then the third thing that we can confidently expect is that I can anticipate his involvement in my life. Because after all, isn't that the message of Christmas? The message of Christmas is that in the fullness of time, God comes in the person of Jesus and he enters into our world to bear our sin and to carry our sorrows and to give us an ever-increasing anticipation for that day when God is going to make everything new. And I don't profess to know fully what lives in the hearts of each of the people gathered here this morning. I know my own struggles, that I trust that you're probably not a lot unlike me. And it may well be that there are some of us here, life is just sailing along peachy key and that's a wonderful thing, because then God expects you to share that with others who are strugglers on the road to life. But chances are that living in the world in which we live, facing the rage of the white witch who wants to keep us all in bondage, chances are pretty good in your life that in my life there are some bumps along the road. Some sins that, well, we've sort of given up fighting them because I don't see how I'm going to win the battle. Some relationships that are just too much work and so we've just turned a cold shoulder to each other because, well, they're never going to change anyway. Economic situations that we find ourselves in that we've been struggling against for Lord knows how many years and we say to ourselves, it'll never be different. And so we just resign ourselves to that new level of deadness that enables us to cope with the pain. Places where we have failed badly and our failure haunts us and people around us will never let us forget because somehow they take a perverted delight in our pain or in our struggles and the message of Christmas, the message of Advent, the message of anticipation is that God has done everything that he knows how to do in Christ in coming into the world to demonstrate that he cares not only, but that we can reasonably expect him to come alongside and either remove the barrier altogether so that we can rise up on wings like eagles or otherwise we can expect him to give us grace to overcome the pull of gravity so that we can live with joy and with power and with anticipation and with freedom before him because we know that what God has promised he's going to fulfill. And just to drive the whole point home, I want to end with one more video. It's the story of a woman by the name of Serena Woods. It's an extreme story but the Bible is filled with extreme stories because if God can do it for the last and the lost and the least, he can do it for you and he can do it for me. Take a look at this and then I'll come back up and close off the service. I was born in Utah and my mom was 15 and she was bipolar, a prostitute, multiple personality disorder. Her age and her mental disability and her lifestyle just kept me in the grip of the evil that men who prey on broken people are capable of. These people that hurt us knew that the best way to hurt her was to hurt me. So they would torture me and make her a watch. I've been dangled over concrete from a balcony by my ankle. I've sat with a cocked and loaded gun to my temple. I've had cigarettes put out on me, I've been stabbed with needles and this was all before I was six. I was put into foster care after that. I was in 11 different homes in about a little over three years and then I was put up for adoption and I was adopted when I was 10 and I ran away when I was 17 and I became a single mom at 19 and I became a Christian while I was pregnant. I wanted my future to be different than my past and I had tried on my own and I just couldn't get it right. [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:29:33.080; remove through 00:39:32.000] I just couldn't get a grip on anything to be [CUT] successful at anything and so I decided to become a Christian and I put all of my past, every bit of it, just in the furthest, darkest corner of the basement of my mind and just left it there and I just completely started over and that worked for about nine years. I read my Bible all the time, all of my friends were Christians. I was going to a church, I went to church all the time. That was my life. That was it for me. Then I had an affair. You know, my whole life, all the pain, it was the pain of a victim which is a little bit different than the pain of having no one by yourself to blame. When everything is falling apart, when everything hurts, when there's nothing but destruction and to be the one that carries that blame, that I've never felt anything like that. Nothing in my childhood. And what it was, where the pain came from, was knowing who God is and knowing who Jesus is and then knowing that I had ruined it, that I had separated myself from Him. There was no sorry and no amount of tears and nothing that I could do to take it back. I remember one day I was praying and I said, "God, I know what your people say about me and I know what my sin says about me, but I need to hear it from you. Because if I can't, if you can't redeem this, if you can't forgive me, then I don't want to be here." And I finished my prayer by having a devotion and the scripture that the author of the devotion book that I was reading used a scripture from Isaiah 54. So I read that chapter and about halfway through I started hearing God answer my question and He said that He has compassion on me. He called me storm-battered and unpityed, but He has compassion on me and He's bringing me back and that He was going to rebuild me and that if anybody attacked me it wouldn't be from Him. Just knowing that I wasn't alone through all of that, that He saw all of it, was really healing for me. My childhood didn't break me. I was born fighting and I survived that, but my failure broke me. My failure showed me a part of Jesus I never would have seen before. And I know what my purpose is now. It's to share my story of God's unbelievable grace. Let's pray together. I'm reminded again, Lord, of that word in Hosea, "As surely as the dawn, He will come." And Lord, all of us have places of hunger, places of desire, and some of those desires are desires that you have planted within us and you have not allowed that desire to be fueled by the things of the world, though you know how hard we have tried and how often we still do. I pray, Lord, this morning for myself and for all of us here, that when we connect with that hunger, and when we connect with those undefined longings for paradise lost, that desire to be home again, that we will not rest nor give you any rest until you make Jerusalem a praise in the earth. Because Lord God, you have not only given us your promise, you have fulfilled that promise in the person of the Lord Jesus who came that we might have life and we might have it abundantly. And so we come to you now, even in the midst of the present busyness of life, where so often we're so busy we can't even connect with what it is that we feel our hunger or long for on the inside. And we pray, Father God, that you will birth anticipation in us this holiday season, because the winter is long past and the spring has come, because Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God. So help us, Lord, to open up our hearts and our homes to receive our King, and we cry out together collectively, "O come, O come, Emmanuel," and ransom captive Israel. We pray it together in Jesus' name, amen. Mary, my love, Lord, we seek you. every heart here waits as a watch. Lord, join near us, for we need you where another, O Lord Jesus, comes. Where your people are joined together, Lord, your Spirit fills that place. You are here now, Lord, forever. Now with the Spirit, one day face to face. O come, O Lord, come. We await your presence, O Lord, come. O come and meet us. We long to see you. Where another, O Lord Jesus, comes. Now we watch, Lord, for your appearing when the veil is torn away. And as we see your freedom mirroring, may this prayer grow stronger every day. O Lord, come. O Lord, come. We await your presence, O Lord, come. O come and meet us. We long to see you. Where another, O Lord Jesus, comes. O Lord, come. O Lord, come. We await your presence, O Lord, come. O come and meet us. We long to see you. Where another, O Lord Jesus, comes. [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:39:32.000; resume after this marked segment]